AMMAN: Jordan’s first quarter tourism revenue dropped 11.9 per cent as visitor numbers from Europe and North America fell by more than a fifth because of wars in neighboring nations, Jordan’s tourism minister said on Tuesday.
Jordan shares frontiers with Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State has seized swathes of territory. Amman took a lead role in conducting air strikes against the hard-line group after it burned alive a captured Jordanian pilot earlier this year. “We’ve seen a negative impact on foreign visitors to Jordan, especially in the first three months (of 2015),” Nayef Al-Fayez, Jordan’s minister of tourism and antiquities, told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Dubai.
“We saw an increase last year, people started coming back and then all of a sudden with what happened in the region we’re seeing a decline in the numbers.” The number of tourists visiting Jordan fell 9.4 per cent in the first quarter to 1.12 million from 1.24 million a year earlier, Fayez said, adding tourist numbers also fell in April. This led the sector’s quarterly revenue to decline to JD642 million ($906.5 million) from 729 million dinars in the prior-year period — a fall of 11.9 per cent.
